The meme of the day in journo-world is that President Obama has stumbled at the outset of the general election campaign. The evidence for this? Well, uh, there isn’t very much, really–except that a few Democrats have criticized his campaign’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital and that Obama’s fundraising is merely humongous, instead of obscenely humongous. The two phenomena are linked, of course: Obama isn’t getting the usual haul from Wall Street because he has outrageously–outrageously!–tried to regulate the bankers who did so much to crash the economy in 2008. The handful of Democrats squawking are people who either (a) get money from private equity firms or (b) have retired and joined Mondo Casino. But there is another side to this story:
Apparently, Massachusetts voters don’t mind that Elizabeth Warren foolishly identified herself as a Native American early in her academic career–it was, apparently, a case of family pride and wishful thinking about a Cherokee ancestor. That’s good. Warren may be the best public figure when it comes to explaining the depredations of the financial industry and [...]
On what we should learn from 11 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The New York Times is reporting that Iran may be about to open its Parchin military facility to international inspections. This is a biggish deal, but not a complete breakthrough. Parchin is where Iran may have been conducting experiments on weaponizing its nuclear fuel; there has been speculation that the facility housed a chamber to test [...]
Alec MacGillis of the NewRepublic has been doing some fine campaign reporting this year and here he offers a smart look at what may be the most important state of all in November–Ohio. The most striking part of the piece for me, one that illuminates an essential conundrum for Barack Obama, occurs when MacGillis goes [...]
As the Jeremiah Wright ad campaign zooms into the dustbin of history, it must be noted that Mitt Romney promptly and firmly did the right thing. He denounced it: “I want to make it very clear: I repudiate that effort,” Romney said at a news conference. “I think it’s the wrong course.. . . I hope that our [...]
My colleague Fareed Zakaria has a really smart column today about Germany’s role in the Greek debt crisis–and guess what? He’s not bashing the Germans for fiscal austerity. He’s praising them for the compassion they’ve shown, at a stiff cost to German taxpayers, to keep the Greeks afloat. For me, though, the most interesting thing [...]
There’s a front-page story in the New York Times about the possibility that a right-wing super PAC will launch a racially charged attack against President Obama centering on his relationship with the dreadful Rev. Jeremiah Wright. This is the campaign that John McCain famously, and honorably, refused to launch in 2008. I suspect it probably [...]
It looks like Iran is going to make a serious proposal at next week’s round of nuclear talks in Baghdad. But the true test for President Obama will be whether he can hold his coalition together to continue economic sanctions until the Iranians agree to the most important item on the agenda–intrusive inspections of Iranian facilities [...]
Sometimes you feel an otherworldly–perhaps even divine–presence in the affairs of humankind. Today we have the astonishing juxtaposition of President Obama’s awkward, belated embrace of gay marriage, and the painful Washington Post story about Mitt Romney’s days as a bully at the ritzy Cranbrook School in Detroit. In the end, I suspect, neither of these [...]
